Citizen Programmers
Steve Jones finds the Salesforce platform interesting and notes we have lots of "citizen programmers" doing work with data.
Cloud Identities versus Federated Identities in Office 365
Identities, the 'accounts' by which Cloud and Web users identify themselves, are tricky to manage, and tiresome for the users. Cloud services such as Office 365 have their main use in large organisations and so there have to be easy ways for system administrators to maintain them. Microsoft provide three alternative strategies; Cloud identities, Synced identities and federated identities. What is the differences between them, and which should you choose?
SQL Monitor Custom Metric: Excessive Virtual Log Files in Transaction Log
This metric picks up excessive counts of Virtual Log Files (VLF) in a transaction log that can lead to performance problems, including write performance, restore and recovery times. The ideal value for this metric should be less than 25; excessively high values (greater than 50) can cause high write times when writing to the transaction log.
SQL Server Survey
How do you use SQL Server, and how do you expect this to change next year? Fill in our survey, and enter a prize draw to win Amazon vouchers.
Lead and Lag Functions in SQL Server 2012
Arshad Ali discusses how to use CTE and the ranking function to access or query data from previous or subsequent rows. He also shows you how to leverage the LEAD and LAG analytics functions to achieve the same result without writing a self-join query using CTE and ranking function
Holiday Struggles
The sporadic schedule of a day or two a week this holiday season has been a struggle for Steve Jones.
SSRS - Report for Stored Procedure with Multiple Values Passed
You created a report that passed three separate values to a stored procedure, simply enough. However, now the user comes back and they want the ability to select multiple values for the report to return data against. Check out this article for a walk-through on how to handle this request.
The 2014 Tribal Awards - Nominations Open
Nominations open until December 10. The Tribal Awards are back and looking to recognize some of the great contributors to the SQL community. Nominations are now open for 11 different categories, but closing soon so make sure your user group, favorite twitter account, or person who's helped you the most this year is nominated.
Continuous Delivery for Databases: Microservices, Team Structures, and Conway's Law
Matthew Skelton proposes a way to enable database continuous delivery that isn’t as outlandish as it first appears. What can Conways Law and Microservices tell us about the future of databases and DBAs? Matthew shows us a glimpse.
SQL Server Developer tools survey
Participate in an online survey on SQL Server Developer Tools for a chance to win one of ten $100 Amazon vouchers.
Blogs
Upgrading SQL Server Containers on the Laptop
By Steve Jones
I don’t have SQL Server installed on my laptop. In an effort to keep...
How to Find Expensive Queries in Amazon Redshift
Slow-running queries can degrade your Redshift cluster’s performance and lead to increased costs. Identifying...
The Notification Trap: How Input Fatigue Is Killing Deep Work in Tech
By gbargsley
If you've been here before, you know this blog is usually about SQL Server,...
Forums
SQL 2019 instance with AG, across 2 Windows 2016 OS servers - OSin-place upgrade
Hi all Can I get some perspective from the community please on performing in-place...
How Long is a Long I/O?
Comments posted to this topic are about the item How Long is a Long...
T-SQL Trigonometric Functions in SQL Server
Comments posted to this topic are about the item T-SQL Trigonometric Functions in SQL...
Question of the Day
How Long is a Long I/O?
In SQL Server 2025, a long I/O is recorded in the error log with message 833. How long much an I/O request be outstanding before this message is written to the log?
See possible answers